—— ENGLISH DESCRIPTION ——-
Checking movie showtimes, surfing movie descriptions, checking out trailers as well as ticket booking, all of those are now ready to serve you seamlessly with CinePicks installed on your devices.

CinePicks Vietnam enables you to view great info about all the blockbuster movies appearing at most of cinemas in Vietnam. You are now be able to quickly check which movie is worth watching right in your palm.

*** FEATURES ***
– Show the info of all now-showing and upcoming movies (support only Megastar cinemas at the moment)
– Watch the movie trailer inside the app (not in web browser)
– Show the showtimes of a movie of each cinema
– Call a cinema tone for placing ticket

If you have any idea to let the app offer your better life, please contact me via Feedback button inside the app.

Later in this article, I'm going to tell you something you probably don't know about Drew Houston, the founder and CEO of Dropbox.

I'm a big fan of Drew. I have known him for many years (well before he started Dropbox) and am honored to call him a friend. I will cancel plans with my wife to hang out with Drew if he and I happen to be in the same city. There are only a few people I'd do that for. Plus, it helps that she loves Dropbox and uses it every day.

Disclosure: Drew is on the advisory board for my company, HubSpot.

There's one big lesson and insight I want to draw out from Drew and Dropbox's story.

The worst outcome for a startup is not failure — its mediocrity. When I first met Drew, he was still working for a local Boston-area software company called Bit9 (in the security space, and they're still around). Good company. Drew was in the midst of working on a startup idea that was in the SAT prep space (the company was called “Accolade”). I met with Drew for dinner to talk about Accolade and his plans for it. Candidly, I was not a big fan of the idea, and told him so. It was a super-competitive category, it was going to be hard to differentiate. Most importantly though, I was not sure how big of an opportunity it was. I just didn't see it being a big, “break-out” business.

I knew that Drew was really smart — but I didn't have enough evidence to know if he was going to be a great entrepreneur. I know many, many really smart people. Few of them have what it takes to be great entrepreneurs. As it turns out, Drew is one of those people, but I didn't know it at the time.

Continuing the story…Drew ultimately ended up abandoning the SAT prep idea to do something different. He had this other idea for syncing files across multiple devices. It was a problem he faced himself. It too was a highly competitive market — but it was a really big one.

Here's the big lesson: Many founders think that the worst outcome you can have in a startup is failure. You try something and it fails. And yes, failing is no fun. But, what's worse than failing is going sideways for years and years. The worst is being stuck in a quagmire of mediocrity. Things are going reasonably well, but not spectacularly well. The reason mediocrity is worse than failure is very simple: Failure lets you move on, mediocrity stalls you and keeps you from reaching your potential.

It's not knowable as to whether Accolade (Drew's SAT prep startup) would have been a phenomenal success or not. But, it's doubtful that it had near the potential that Dropbox did. Had Drew “stuck to it” with Accolade, it's likely that Dropbox would have never happened and tens of millions people (including me and my wife) would have been less happy. And, of course, Drew would have been worse off for it. As he will tell you, Dropbox has been super-fun and super-gratifying. We all dream to have a startup like that someday.

It would have been a sub-optimal use of talent and energy for Drew to have gotten stuck in a quagmire of mediocrity. Not a complete waste of his time — because few entrepreneurial endeavors are wastes of time, just sub-optimal.

Imagine if all the founders that are currently stuck in “sideways” startups could somehow pull themselves out of the muck, clean themselves off, and take another crack at becoming legendary. How much better off would they and the world be?

Of course, there's one big counter-argument to all of this. How do you know whether you're stuck in a quagmire? Isn't startup success often about persistence and focus? What if that break-out success is just around the corner. Those are good questions. The simple answer is: There are no simple answers. If it were me, the question I would ponder is this: If 90% of everything started going “right” with your startup, what will it become? (I'll call this the “wave the magic wand”, best-case scenario). If the answer does not please you, and you've been at your current idea for a while, I'd ponder a change.

The danger of "ramen profitability": One of the great things about software startups today is that it's very possible to reach “ramen profitability”. This is where the company is making enough money that the founders can live on Ramen Noodles. That's also one of the bad things. Once you get to “ramen profitability”, running out of cash is no longer a way to know that you should be starting afresh and trying something new. You can run a startup like that indefinitely — and many entrepreneurs will do just that, instead of building the next Dropbox and becoming legendary.

One point I'd like to clarify: I'm not suggesting that stable, sustainable businesses with modest growth are a bad thing. Just that if the business is not something the founder is passionate about — she should move on. Life is short. We don't all need to build the next Dropbox — but we all should stretch ourselves. It reminds me of an idea that Tim O'Reilly planted in my head: Pursue something so important that even if you fail, the world is better off with you having tried.

Easy to say, very hard to do. It's easy for me to say "Hey, you should abandon that startup you're working on that doesn't seem to be going anywhere," but that is sooo much easier said than done. I've struggled with that very problem myself. It's hard to let go. It's hard to give up something you've toiled away at. It's hard to all of a sudden admit "you know, my friends may have been right…" It's hard, because we're human and we become emotionally attached to the things we build. Particularly things we've had to defend against the cold, hard world. Things we've had to nurture and defend. Things that in some ways define our identity. I have no brilliant insights other than: Be honest with yourself and be mindful of your opportunity cost. Life is short. We have a limited amount of time to achieve our potential.

TRY!
Yep, I am going to share a real case I experienced with a co-worker. He was a designer, I was a business analyst (BA) for a software product. Per process of product development, a new feature’s UI of a product must go through mock-up designation phase by BA, being approved, then UI designation phase by designer to being approved, finally coding phase by developers. (Notice that BA is responsible for timeline of the whole process). When it comes to UI phase, I described every aspect of the feature to him in order to make its UI look shiny & intuitive and how urgent the demand pushed by business was. We then came to an agreement on the date of initial design works. However, everything didn’t work out as planned. The time came, bosses waited for his work to review and make suggestion, but there was no stuff for them though I pushed him on daily basis since that day. The reason he gave to me was “I said ‘I’LL TRY’, I did not confirm that I’ll surely deliver it at that day”. Wooo, I forgot the word, I did ignore the word, the key word in his sentence. Haha, it’s a lesson learned.

So, that’s my story. Below is the explanation by experts.

FORTUNE — After fraud, theft, flood, and fire, the most dangerous word to use in the workplace today is short, sweet, and fraught with peril: try.
Why try?

Whether in a job interview, on a resume, or in the office, try simply shows a lack of belief, passion, commitment, and confidence — all the qualities you need to succeed in today’s tight job market. Grammarly’s contextual thesaurus has a whopping 66 different synonyms for try, yet none of them are as convincing as words like do, believe, act, tackle, accomplish, or succeed. While try might get you 10%, or even halfway there, employers are looking for strong problem solving skills and unwavering dedication.
I cringe when I hear, “I’ll give it a try,” because the phrase suggests failure. “I’ll do it” inspires confidence every time.

On a resume, try indicates a task or responsibility that is either incomplete or vague; it is one of the few three-letter words that can get your resume moved to the rejection pile. It may be even worse than all of those famous four-letter words. On the other hand, action verbs backed up by facts and examples can make a resume — and an individual — stand out.
Likewise, in an interview, when candidates are required to be sharp and precise, try comes across as uncertain at best. Hiring managers are looking for someone with a spark in his or her eyes and confidence in his or her voice. The words you use matter, a lot.
If you contact a company and request action on an issue, hearing “I’ll try” isn’t going to alleviate your frustration; as a matter of fact, it’s more likely to exacerbate the problem. Likewise, when I hear employees say they will “try to meet a deadline,” “try to close a deal,” or “try to handle a customer issue,” my next question is what we need to do to ensure their success. When asked to complete a task that you do not feel is realistic, it’s better to suggest a more feasible goal. Managers appreciate problem solvers and employees who come to the table with solutions rather than problems.
While try is the most dangerous word that an employee or jobseeker can use in the workplace, there are certainly other “danger words” that also indicate negativity, uncertainty, or controversy at work: someday, if, never, maybe, used to, can’t, and excessive acronyms or slang can also doom your chances of getting (or keeping) a job.

Ultimately, words carry plenty of power in both verbal and written communication. Your cover letter and resume account for your first impression to a potential employer. Successive phone and in-person interviews can enhance or detract from that impression, and the way you carry yourself in day-to-day business interactions — from emails to meetings to reports to customer interactions — will determine your reputation in the workplace. When you use words with power and impact, and deliver on expectations, you are sharpening your image, bolstering your potential, and giving your career a chance to shine.
So don’t try, do; don’t doubt, believe; and don’t wonder, act.

Yep, I love the post from the bottom of my heart. I have also experienced a course of Coursera’s ones. 3 words to describe it as “an amazing opportunity ever happened”. Give it a try at https://www.coursera.org/ and you will feel regretful that why you haven’t known it before 😉

Now, enjoy the post about these similar online courses and their outcome given to the whole world.

LORD knows there’s a lot of bad news in the world today to get you down, but there is one big thing happening that leaves me incredibly hopeful about the future, and that is the budding revolution in global online higher education. Nothing has more potential to lift more people out of poverty — by providing them an affordable education to get a job or improve in the job they have. Nothing has more potential to unlock a billion more brains to solve the world’s biggest problems. And nothing has more potential to enable us to reimagine higher education than the massive open online course, or MOOC, platforms that are being developed by the likes of Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and companies like Coursera and Udacity.

Last May I wrote about Coursera — co-founded by the Stanford computer scientists Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng — just after it opened. Two weeks ago, I went back out to Palo Alto to check in on them. When I visited last May, about 300,000 people were taking 38 courses taught by Stanford professors and a few other elite universities. Today, they have 2.4 million students, taking 214 courses from 33 universities, including eight international ones.

Anant Agarwal, the former director of M.I.T.’s artificial intelligence lab, is now president of edX, a nonprofit MOOC that M.I.T. and Harvard are jointly building. Agarwal told me that since May, some 155,000 students from around the world have taken edX’s first course: an M.I.T. intro class on circuits. “That is greater than the total number of M.I.T. alumni in its 150-year history,” he said.

Yes, only a small percentage complete all the work, and even they still tend to be from the middle and upper classes of their societies, but I am convinced that within five years these platforms will reach a much broader demographic. Imagine how this might change U.S. foreign aid. For relatively little money, the U.S. could rent space in an Egyptian village, install two dozen computers and high-speed satellite Internet access, hire a local teacher as a facilitator, and invite in any Egyptian who wanted to take online courses with the best professors in the world, subtitled in Arabic.

YOU just have to hear the stories told by the pioneers in this industry to appreciate its revolutionary potential. One of Koller’s favorites is about “Daniel,” a 17-year-old with autism who communicates mainly by computer. He took an online modern poetry class from Penn. He and his parents wrote that the combination of rigorous academic curriculum, which requires Daniel to stay on task, and the online learning system that does not strain his social skills, attention deficits or force him to look anyone in the eye, enable him to better manage his autism. Koller shared a letter from Daniel, in which he wrote: “Please tell Coursera and Penn my story. I am a 17-year-old boy emerging from autism. I can’t yet sit still in a classroom so [your course] was my first real course ever. During the course, I had to keep pace with the class, which is unheard-of in special ed. Now I know I can benefit from having to work hard and enjoy being in sync with the world.”

One member of the Coursera team who recently took a Coursera course on sustainability told me that it was so much more interesting than a similar course he had taken as an undergrad. The online course included students from all over the world, from different climates, incomes levels and geographies, and, as a result, “the discussions that happened in that course were so much more valuable and interesting than with people of similar geography and income level” in a typical American college.

Mitch Duneier, a Princeton sociology professor, wrote an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education in the fall about his experience teaching a class through Coursera: “A few months ago, just as the campus of Princeton University had grown nearly silent after commencement, 40,000 students from 113 countries arrived here via the Internet to take a free course in introductory sociology. … My opening discussion of C. Wright Mills’s classic 1959 book, ‘The Sociological Imagination,’ was a close reading of the text, in which I reviewed a key chapter line by line. I asked students to follow along in their own copies, as I do in the lecture hall. When I give this lecture on the Princeton campus, I usually receive a few penetrating questions. In this case, however, within a few hours of posting the online version, the course forums came alive with hundreds of comments and questions. Several days later there were thousands. … Within three weeks I had received more feedback on my sociological ideas than I had in a career of teaching, which significantly influenced each of my subsequent lectures and seminars.”

Agarwal of edX tells of a student in Cairo who was taking the circuits course and was having difficulty. In the class’s online forum, where students help each other with homework, he posted that he was dropping out. In response, other students in Cairo in the same class invited him to meet at a teahouse, where they offered to help him stay in the course. A 15-year-old student in Mongolia, who took the same class as part of a blended course and received a perfect score on the final exam, added Agarwal, is now applying to M.I.T. and the University of California, Berkeley.

As we look to the future of higher education, said the M.I.T. president, L. Rafael Reif, something that we now call a “degree” will be a concept “connected with bricks and mortar” — and traditional on-campus experiences that will increasingly leverage technology and the Internet to enhance classroom and laboratory work. Alongside that, though, said Reif, many universities will offer online courses to students anywhere in the world, in which they will earn “credentials” — certificates that testify that they have done the work and passed all the exams. The process of developing credible credentials that verify that the student has adequately mastered the subject — and did not cheat — and can be counted on by employers is still being perfected by all the MOOCs. But once it is, this phenomenon will really scale.

I can see a day soon where you’ll create your own college degree by taking the best online courses from the best professors from around the world — some computing from Stanford, some entrepreneurship from Wharton, some ethics from Brandeis, some literature from Edinburgh — paying only the nominal fee for the certificates of completion. It will change teaching, learning and the pathway to employment. “There is a new world unfolding,” said Reif, “and everyone will have to adapt.”

Initial approach:
We all, and salesmen in particular, know that customers need to be understood then to be ‘seduced’ into buying certain products. ;)) However, as salesmen, usually they save far less time for purely listening to customers’ concern, surely trying all their best to talk about their products/services as much as possible instead. This 100% leads them to predictable wrong ways while pursuing revenue development with a breakthrough.

So, continue reading the post? Enjoy?

How much time do you spend truly listening to buyers and customers? Marketers get little, if any, quality time with the real people they hope to persuade to listen to them.
Once or twice a year, you may attend a client dinner or an industry conference. But even if your company hosts a customer advisory meeting several times a year, it will probably spend at least 80 percent of this time presenting to customers, and whenever a customer is speaking, the topic will focus on solution support or usability, not the customer’s buying experience.
If you’re like most marketers, you rely on the sales people for your information about how and why buyers make their decisions. Since sales reps typically talk to customers all day, you could assume that they know their buyers.
But, to paraphrase the the Gershwin song from “Porgy and Bess,” it ain’t necessarily so. If sales is telling you that price and features dominate the buyer’s concerns, you can be darn certain it ain’t so.
Many of you will identify with my client Dave (not his real name) who related that his organization was so focused on making the sale and pitching to clients that “we were just shooting ourselves in the foot.”
Dave is a product marketer. His organization had a common problem. Years ago, management saw a specific business problem and brought to market a solution to address it. Each new customer had a brand new set of enhancement requests, and the company had been completely focused on solving the current customers’ needs. Suddenly a competitive threat emerged that would require senior management to redeploy limited resources.
This dilemma provided the perfect opportunity to slow down, take a deep breath and listen to buyers. And that’s exactly what Dave did. He started interviewing recent evaluators. Each interview became another opportunity to get comfortable with the probing questions that revealed surprising insights. After a relatively small number of interviews, he began to see the themes that spanned all of them.
From these conversations, Dave knows how his product addresses a pervasive problem in the industry. He knows what the buyers are saying about the competitor’s approach, including their strengths and weaknesses. Analyzing his product’s successes and failures, he can apply this insight to potential market segments.
This is a starting point for building the buyer personas that Dave needs to develop an effective marketing and sales enablement strategy. Dave has even found a novel approach to developing highly qualified leads that he hadn’t thought of before.
All of this information came from simply stopping the endless selling (and marketing) and starting to listen and learn from the only people that really matter – the target buyers.
Why do many marketers never get around to talking to customers and buyers?
I’ll let Dave answer: “Sales people keep saying they just need more leads, ROI calculators and that sort of thing. We’re so busy working on our marketing checklists that there is never enough time to get out,” he told me. “I always knew my opinion was irrelevant but I never guessed that the opinions of the sales people were also irrelevant.”
While I’ve changed Dave’s name and a few minor details, everything else I’ve shared here is true. I’ll keep Dave’s secrets about what he actually learned from talking to customers though. That information is an advantage that would be lost if his competitors got their hands on it.

Thoughts of mine:
I do appreciate the author of the post. The post is all about saying no to keeping watching and judging the performance of others, and yourself in particular, all the time; experiencing the journey and feeling what it looks like instead. This somehow reminds me of the quote “Success is not a destination, it’s a journey.” The article explains it in a clear way and give me insight into the difference of acting based on performance and experience. I’ll follow the rule to experience upcoming moments in my life rather than judging myself on what I have done and what I could not achieve.

Be interested? Read it and enjoy it 🙂

The night before our wedding, Eleanor and I stood awkwardly in the center of a large room, surrounded by our family and our closest friends. There was no particular reason to be uncomfortable; this was just a rehearsal. Still, we were in the spotlight and things weren’t going smoothly. Neither the rabbi nor the cantor had arrived and we didn’t know where to stand, what to say, or what to do.

It had taken us 11 years — and a lot of work — to get to this point. Eleanor is Episcopalian, the daughter of a deacon, and I am Jewish, the son of a Holocaust survivor. The one thing our parents agreed about before the wedding was that we shouldn’t get married.

A friend of ours, Sue Anne Steffey Morrow, a Methodist minister, offered to stand in for the Jewish officiants who were absent. She moved us through the rehearsal, placing people in position, reading prayers, and lightening the mood with a few well-timed jokes.

When the rehearsal was over and we were feeling more relaxed, she offered me and Eleanor a piece of advice that remains one of the best I have ever received.

“Tomorrow hundreds of people will be watching you on the most important day of your life. Try to remember this: It’s not a performance; it’s an experience.”

I love that she said “Try to remember this.” On the surface it seems easy to remember but in reality it’s almost impossibly difficult, because much of what we do feels like a performance. We’re graded in school and get performance reviews at work. We win races, earn titles, receive praise, and sometimes gain fame, all because of our performance. We’re paid for our performance. Even little things — leading a meeting, having a hallway conversation, sending an email — are followed by the silent but ever-present question: “How’d that go?”

In other words, we think life is a performance because, well, it kind of is. We feel judged by others because, often, we are. And let’s be honest, it’s not just they who judge us; most of us spend a considerable amount of energy judging others as well. Which, of course, only reinforces our own experience of being judged. And fuels our desire to perform.

But here’s the paradox: living life as a performance is not only a recipe for stress and unhappiness; it also leads to mediocre performance.

If you want to get better at anything, you need to experiment with an open mind, to try and fail, to willingly accept and learn from any outcome.

And once you get an outcome you like, you need to be willing to shake it up again and try something different. The best performers are life-long learners, and the definition of a life-long learner is someone who is constantly trying new things. That requires performing poorly much of the time and, often unpredictably, brilliantly some of the time.

If you view life as a performance, your failures will be so painful and terrifying that you will stop experimenting. But if you view life as an experience, your failures are just part of that experience.

What makes a performance different than an experience? It’s all in your head.

Are you trying to look good? Do you want to impress others or win something? Are you looking for acceptance, approval, accolades, wild thunderous applause? Is it painful when you don’t get those things? You’re probably performing.

If you’re experiencing, on the other hand, you’re exploring what something feels like. Trying to see what would happen if…

When you’re experiencing, you can appreciate negative outcomes as well as positive ones. Sure, acceptance and approval and accolades feel good, but those things don’t determine success. Success is based on whether you fully immerse yourself in the experience, no matter how it turns out, and whether you learn from it. That’s a result you can always achieve regardless of the outcome.

When you’re experiencing though, it’s not about the end result, it’s about the moment. You’re not pursuing a feeling after, you’re having a feeling during. You can’t be manipulated by a fickle, outside measure because you’re motivated by a stable internal one.

So how can we let go of performance in favor of experience? Here’s something that’s helped me: Several times a day I’ll complete this sentence: “This is what it feels like to…”

This is what it feels like to receive praise. This is what it feels like to be in love. This is what it feels like to be stuck writing a proposal. This is what it feels like to present to the CEO. This is what it feels like to be embarrassed. This is what it feels like to be appreciated.

Saying that, and feeling whatever comes up, instantly drops me into experience. Performance loses its primacy and my mind releases its focus on outcome. There are no bad feelings; they all make life richer.

On the day of our wedding, I took Sue Anne’s advice. And when I think back now — it’s been 13 years — the moments I remember most clearly and with most fondness are the things we did not rehearse, the things that went wrong but somehow gave the wedding its life. Even our rehearsal, which clearly did not go as planned with its missing rabbi, was perfect since it led us to integrate a minister — especially meaningful for Eleanor and her family — in a more substantial way than we had anticipated.

As a performance, I have no idea how to judge it. But as an experience, it was perfect. An experience always is.